BENGALURU: For us, as we are, learning implies the accumulation of ideas - ideas being rationalized and carefully worked-out thought. As we learn we formulate a structure of ideas and having established a formula of ideas, ideals or conclusions, then we act. So there is action separate from idea. This is our life - we formulate first and then try to act according to that formulation. But we are concerned with something entirely different, which is, that the act of learning is action; that in the very process of learning action is taking place and that therefore, there is no conflict.
I think it is important to understand from the very beginning that we are not formulating any philosophy, any intellectual structure of ideas or of theological or purely in intellectual concepts. We are concerned with bringing about in our lives a total revolution which has nothing whatever to do with the structure of society as it is. On the contrary, unless we understand the whole psychological structure of society of which we are part, which we have put together through centuries, and are entirely free from that structure, there can be no total psychological revolution - and a revolution of that kind is absolutely essential.
You must know what is taking place in the world; of the enormous discontent boiling over and expressing itself in different ways - of the hippies, the beatniks, the provos in America - and of the wars going on, for which we are responsible. It is not only the Americans and the Vietnamese, but each one of us, who are responsible for these monstrous wars - and we are not using the word `responsible’ casually. We are responsible, whether they take place in the Middle East, or in the Far East, or anywhere else.
There is great starvation going on, inefficient government and the piling up of armaments, and so on. Observing all this, one demands, naturally and humanly, that there must be change, that there must be a revolution in the way of our thinking and living. When is that revolution to begin? It has always been thought by the Communists, by the Nationalists, by all organized religious authorities, that the individual doesn’t matter at all; the individual can be persuaded in any direction. Though they assert common freedom for man, they do everything to prevent that freedom.
The organized religions throughout the world brainwash people to make them conform to a particular pattern, which they call religious ideas and rituals. The Communists, the Capitalists, the Socialists are not concerned with the individual at all, although they talk about him; but I don’t see how a radical change can come about except through the individual. For the individual human being is the result of the total experience, knowledge and conduct of man - it is in us. We are the storehouse of all the past, the racial, the family, the individual’s experience of life - we are that, and unless in the very essence of our being there is a revolution, a mutation, I do not see how a good society can come about.
When we talk about the individual, we are not opposing him to, or setting him against, the collective, the mass, the whole of mankind, because the human individual is the whole of mankind. Unless you feel that, such a statement becomes merely an intellectual concept. Unless each one of us recognizes the central fact that we as individual human beings represent the whole of mankind, whether they live in the Orient or the Occident, we shall not see how to act.